


The House of Her Spirit

by aderyn



Series: Stranger [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Childhood, Doctor John, Injury, the strangeness of Sherlock, volcanoes & family dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-05
Updated: 2013-02-05
Packaged: 2017-11-28 08:06:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/672139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock was a twin once.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The House of Her Spirit

**Author's Note:**

> This is for the bright-burning[ Moranion](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Moranion/pseuds/Moranion), who prompted me with strangeness. Thank you to  
> [pennypaperbrain](http://archiveofourown.org/users/pennypaperbrain/pseuds/pennypaperbrain) for the conversation about otherness and Sherlock and Sally.

_“But no, it was not herself that was on fire. It was the house of her spirit.  It was her dream…it was Orion; the Pleiades, it was their house by the sea.”—Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano_   


 

His mother was a volcano. His brother is basalt. His sister was a spark.

He wasn't alone in the womb.

“You aren't alone now,” John says, and his hand on Sherlock’s is warm, because Sherlock has lost quite a bit of blood, but he's all right and he's home now and he's opened, opened, and he says to John,

“You didn't guess a sister.”

“No.”

John has a sister.

“Yes I do,” says John, and furrows his brow, and puts his hand on Sherlock’s and says,

“You never told me.”

“My mother was a volcano,” Sherlock says, doped-up, _dormant, liable to blow._   _My father brooded like the sulfur and the chlorine and the ash. The blighted trees.  My mother was pregnant. My mother was pregnant with us._

“Sherlock?” John says.

“Chimera," Sherlock mutters,"I need to find.”

_I need to find things out. Will I live a double life now a longer life chimeric blood mosaic oh the mosaic._

No need to explain to a doctor the dissolution,the damping,the twin gone before she was, the crossing over into the other body.

“Ah,” John says, and the life bursts forth and the lava bursts forth in the diorama of his childhood, Harry with her fringe and the hand-holding and the hair-pulling and the hair-holding and the punching and Sherlock with an other half a gingery grey-eyed girl with the same gaze and all that was missed and avoided and missed and found instead.

We look for our lost. Or they’re in us already.

Sherlock grips John's fingers, the two of them.

She never made it to the world, he thinks, but she would have been brilliant.

**Author's Note:**

> [Chimera (fire-breathing)](http://www.theoi.com/Ther/Khimaira.html)   
> [Chimeras,mosaics, and vanishing twins](http://genetics.thetech.org/genetic-categories/chimeras-mosaics-and-other-fun-stuff)


End file.
